


As the Phoenix Rises (Again)

by lavendersblues (lonely_lovebird)



Category: MacGyver (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, M/M, Mythology - Freeform, Nothing serious but Mac contemplates death a lot in this fic, Phoenix!MacGyver, Some serious themes that go along with death included, suicidal ideations, tags to be updated
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-18
Updated: 2019-02-23
Packaged: 2019-10-30 16:42:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17832287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonely_lovebird/pseuds/lavendersblues
Summary: Angus MacGyver was born in Scotland in 1690. He died in 1801. Angus Macgyver was born in 1801 and died in 1865. He was born in 1865 and he died in 1929, he was born in 1929 and he died....Mac has been alive for so long now that all he dreams about is a final death, but he's found a reason to live in Jack Dalton. When an old enemy resurfaces and threatens all that Mac holds dear - including his own secret- Mac's relatively peaceful California life is turned on it's head.Who is Murdoc and what does he know about the Phoenix?





	1. Prologue

Angus doesn’t remember his mother’s face.

No matter what he tried, no matter how many nights he lay awake and fought tooth and nail through his own memories, he couldn’t conjure up an image of the woman who had raised and loved him.

It wasn’t for want of trying, but there had never been an image made of his mother. She was born in Scotland in 1670, long before the invention of the camera - and being born to a poor family meant that a portrait was never an option. Angus loved his mother. She had raised him with love, care, and the faintest whisper of hummed lullabies that echoed tauntingly in his memory.

She died in 1732.

James MacGyver had loved his wife beyond life itself, and losing her had broken him. In a fit of despair, he packed up his son and took them to the New World, choosing to settle in Boston Massachusetts and continue working as a Tax Official for the Crown.

Angus’ father died in 1770 in the event that would come to be known as the Boston Massacre. He was hit with a musket ball to the heart, and he limped around a corner before he promptly burst into flames and burned to ashes, leaving nothing behind. Angus shouldn’t have been surprised, he knew what it meant that he and his father were immortal, but he hadn’t expected to see death and rebirth in such vivid and frightening terms.

His father was reborn three days later and they moved to the south, James MacGyver taking up a post as an inventor in Richmond, Virginia.

And the cycle of life and death continued. Angus lost his accent. His father left for good in 1787, with no explanation, no farewell, and no trace left behind. Angus was on his own and the bitterness began to seep in.

He died twice in 1801, once after a mugging in New York City, and once after a duel for the honor of the woman he’d been seeing. She never saw him again after his death, and that rebirth was particularly hard, coming to on the cold ground naked in the New Jersey frost.

Angus moved West - claiming he wanted to follow Manifest Destiny, when really he just needed to hide. The United States was getting smaller, and it was harder and harder to reinvent himself every time he burned up.

He died in 1865 at Palamito Ranch. He wandered away three days later, dragging his feet and browsing the headlines of the newspapers that told him they’d won, and the United States would remain whole.

The turn of the century came and went, as unimpressive as the last two. Electricity fascinated him and Angus began studying the modern technology, and he kept up with the changes marvelously. Soon he even began helping innovate the new technology. He died in 1929 in a riot brought on by the Stock Market crash. He limped away in the October chill and decided that the West is calling a bit harder than it was before.

He moved past the Mississippi for the first time and discovered a world that seemed unreal. Entire landscapes of red, mountains that climbed the skies in deep purples and blues, and plains of golden grass that waved like an ocean in the breeze.

A beautiful boy with deep black hair told him his hair was the color of that same grass as they kissed under the stars. But Angus didn’t stay beyond their night together, no matter how sweet the boy looked at him or how gently he ran his fingers through the deep golden tresses Angus had grown out of some warped sense of pride.

1945 came and went, and Angus realized he had missed an entire war buried in his books when people on the street begin saying they’d lived through the  _ second _ World War. He had been busy in his California home working on more of his inventions and tinkering with new ideas when the news hit that a bomb was dropped on Hiroshima Japan.

The image of the fiery destruction struck a chord deep within Angus and he shivered at the sight.

He’d died a few times since 1929 - he’d frozen to death once, something he didn’t think would happen to a creature of ash and flame. He was killed by a buffalo (not a fun way to go). He was sure the half charred buffalo was a head scratcher for anyone who came across the site where he had died. He was shot twice, once in the back and once by accident. He never learned who had shot him on accident.

And he still hadn’t seen anything of his father. He would have thought that maybe his father were dead if he weren’t so certain of his own inability to rest in that final sleep.

To die and never return, to burn and never wake up, that was something Angus never dreamed of having. He stared at the explosion splashed across the newspaper and he  _ wants _ . Something in him yearned for that all consuming fire, and the thought that maybe, just maybe, he’d finally found a destructive force strong enough to end him.

He joined the Army again for the first time since the Civil War, and he worked his way through Korea and Vietnam before being shot down and taking a nosedive in a plane that exploded and consumed him whole. That time, when he burned, he smiled.

He woke up three days later in the jungle, naked, and angry.

Angus MacGyver found his way home to the United States - it took him nearly ten years, to his own house, that he had to forge paperwork for to say it was willed to himself after the death of his “Uncle” in Vietnam.  He didn’t go back to the Army until the Gulf War when the allure of diffusing bombs grew too great.

He loved the thrill the wires under his fingers gave him, wondering each time if he’d fail and the fire would consume him for the final time.

The few times he failed, he never stayed dead - and he began to fight back angrily, becoming the best at what he did. He returned home angry, bitter, and tired. He reforged his identity again and he enrolled in college in Massachusetts, marveling at the changes in the city that he’d missed as he’d traveled west. 

While at MIT he tried to keep to himself, but a series of events brought him to a party where he met the one and only Wilt Bozer. Bozer quickly became his one and only friend, the only person who looked at the quiet and reclusive genius and thought, “There’s someone I want to get to know better.”  Bozer adopted him quickly after that, and when Angus signed up for another war, Bozer agreed to watch his house in California, claiming that he wanted to get closer to Hollywood anyway.

“Who names their kid Angus?” Bozer had asked, laughing. Angus didn’t have a good enough answer so he laughed and wrote it off as a strange name from old fashioned parents. (If only Bozer knew  _ how _ old fashioned they really were.) He adopted a nickname from Bozer, a name he found suited this newest life of modern inventions, fast cars, and explosions that would wipe out humanity but leave Angus standing.

He became Mac.

And surprisingly he almost liked it.

That was, until he met the loudest and snarkiest Delta he’d ever had the pleasure of working with.

Jack Dalton was a mouth that just wouldn’t stop as he snarked about everything from Mac’s name to his tendency to fidget with paperclips. (He’d been folding paperclips since the early 70s when he just couldn’t stand to sit still any longer.) He was a damn good shot though, and he always managed to look out for Mac, and somehow they worked. The 60 days turned into 360, Mac trailing after his Overwatch with a smile.

The man could somehow make him laugh in a way that Mac hadn’t laughed in over a hundred years. He was the most genuine man Mac had ever met, and his down home southern charm was captivating. He had the strangest sense of humor, a strong familial connection, and he was duty bound to honor in a way that warmed Mac to his core.

So it was surprising to Mac that he suddenly began trying his hardest to keep Jack Dalton alive. Because Jack Dalton was someone Mac felt deserved to live.

And for some reason, it went both ways. Jack wouldn’t leave him - not for anything. Not even when Mac was recruited to a deep cover ops organization that wanted him for his ability to improvise. Jack followed him to California without question, even after all of his bellyaching about missing Texas, and he signed up right alongside Mac with DXS.

And no matter how tired Mac felt, Jack kept him going. He kept him from giving up on a bomb that seemed impossible to diffuse. He kept him going even in the face of despair and destruction.

Mac made it out of Cairo because Jack refused to leave even as the timer on the bomb ticked down. Mac knew he could walk away from the blast, but Jack couldn’t - and nothing would convince Jack to leave his side.

It was the first time Jack said, “You go kaboom, I go kaboom,” and Mac’s heart jumped. He pushed the feeling aside for later evaluation, focusing on keeping the stupid man alive long enough for Mac to do something about it.

He couldn’t seem to figure out the meaning behind the words, but they kept coming back, at every turn, when Mac almost succumbed to his desire to let the explosion take him so he could find rest in the three days of dark and cold and ash - but Jack never left him behind.

“You go kaboom, I go kaboom,” he said, like it was a prayer, a mantra, a life motto. Mac had heard a lot of motivational speakers but this was some other form of dedication that he couldn’t quite understand.

Mac couldn’t be worth it, not with his tired eyes and his smiles that were few and far between. He was a sort of somber personality, one that Bozer excused as Mac being a grandpa on the inside, and Jack excused as Mac being too caught up in his own head. He tried everything to get Mac to smile, and around him Mac wanted nothing more than to give those smiles a little more freely.

But it was hard to be happy as he watched his friend grow grey hair in place of deep brown. As he watched Bozer grow hints of facial hair that began to bring out his maturity and age.

Mac suddenly began to want nothing more than to burn and start again, to leave this life behind and take the heartbreak early before it went too far and he was left a broken shell when they both inevitably left him behind.

And then -

He got shot.


	2. The Only Secret People Keep

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Admonished by her buckled lips   
>  Let every babbler be.   
> The only secret people keep   
>  Is Immortality.
> 
> -Emily Dickinson (The reticent volcano keeps)

Mac knew he was dreaming, because he’d never seen Jack in the clothes he was wearing. Jack Dalton, his partner, was dressed head to toe in Colonial Era clothing - a tunic with puffed sleeves, a soft red leather vest, and breeches that emphasized his strong and muscular thighs. The skyline was Boston - the Boston of Mac’s past, 1768, two years before everything went wrong.

Jack was speaking in his dream and Mac couldn’t make it out, but the low and gruff tone washed over him and warmed him to his core, even in his dream.

Jack reached out and Mac let himself be drawn into an embrace, the feeling of rough cloth familiar and new all at the same time, the leather brushing against his cheek. But then Jack’s voice broke through the dream with shattering reality, words Mac had heard several times over the last three months -

_ “But where did you go Mac? You got shot and we thought you’d died in Italy and you showed up three days later with a sling but why won’t you tell me where you went?” _

Mac jerked awake drenched in sweat, the sun just beginning to stream through the windows of his California hills bedroom. His sheets were ridiculously soft compared to the ghost of homespun cloth and tanned leather that lingered from his dream. Kicking away the material that had tangled around his legs he moved to open the blinds and let the light in.

They had caught Nikki and she had escaped, and Mac was certain it was part of the reason he was having a hard time sleeping.

That, and the fight he’d had with Jack.

After burgers and beers on the deck, Bozer had given Riley a ride back to her DXS issued apartment (now Phoenix Foundation Apartment, and wasn’t Mac just smacking himself over the head for that one), leaving Jack and Mac alone for the first time in a while.

“You never did explain where you went after Nikki’s goon shot you, Mac,” Jack mumbled, twirling his bottle between his fingers and wiping at the condensation. “You had us all worried there, hoss.”

Mac’s stomach sunk through the deck at his words and the bitter and biting venom rose in its place, snapping out of his mouth with waspish accuracy. “I already told you man, I got patched up in Italy and snuck out with my cover ID passport, I don’t know why it’s such a big deal!”

Jack’s broken expression stabbed painfully at Mac’s heart but he pushed past the pain. He couldn’t exactly tell his partner that he’d died in a pillar of fire, burning up until there was nothing but ash, before his entire being reconfigured itself again three days later in blood and pain.

Finishing his beer Jack sighed and pushed away from the deck chair, no longer looking at Mac. He let out a low rumble, like he was clearing his throat of emotion, before he tossed the bottle in the recycle and nodded, his back still facing Mac.

“Yeah, sure, okay buddy. I’ll see you later, okay?”

Mac deflated, crumpling like a punctured hot air balloon, and he watched Jack leave with a lump in his throat.

(Mac had been in a hot air balloon crash once. It had not been pretty. This felt infinitely worse.)

Mac pushed aside the thoughts of the wedge he had inadvertently driven between himself and Jack and got ready for his day. He could hear Bozer snoring in his room and he smiled. Even after two hundred years, Mac still couldn’t help but love mornings. 

He started the coffee machine and pulled out three mugs (one for Jack, should he decide to still come by for coffee), double checking that Bozer had, in fact, washed his own mug the night before (he hadn’t). After washing the mugs, Mac turned to the stove and debated starting a quick breakfast.

Deciding against it for time, Mac headed back for a quick shower, relishing the feeling of the hot water against his sweat sticky skin leftover from the dregs of his nightmare.

Indoor plumbing and hot water heaters were his favorite domestic invention of the twentieth century. He also loved shampoo and conditioner and he smiled as he ran his fingers through his hair under the warm spray.

He heard the front door open and close and he knew Jack wasn’t mad enough to skip picking him up for work. It was a nice reassurance, he didn’t want to have to wake Bozer and beg for a last minute drop off before Bozer headed in for another grueling shift as “a burger flipper, Mac, I’m just the guy who flips burgers”.

Mac toweled off quickly and grabbed a quick set of clean clothes from his dresser, something familiar and easy, a soft blue button up shirt and a pair of well worn jeans that he threw on before lacing up his boots and jogging into the kitchen. His eyes lighted on Jack, pouring coffee into the mug designated “his” mug, and into Mac’s with added sugar. 

Jack glanced up as Mac wandered over to look into the bag that Jack had placed on the counter. Mac’s hair dripped steadily, and he shook his head to dislodge some of the dampness - laughing as Jack protested the water droplets that went flying.

“Come on man, not on the bagels!”

“Sorry,” Mac grinned, “sorry Jack. Thanks for the bagel,” he reached into the bag and retrieved a bagel and took an enormous bite.  _ Onion _ , he realized too late, and he huffed before taking another bite.

“Yeah man, but hurry it up will you? We’ve got a mission in North Korea that Patty wants us on ASAP, and I’m not telling her we’re late because you had to shampoo your hair.”

“I mean, it would be true,” Mac cheekily replied, running a hand through the locks in question. They were longer now, grown out from his high and tight he’d worn for the nearly forty years he’d drifted in and out of the military. It felt like the hair of his childhood, wild and untamed.

Jack snorted. “Yeah but I don’t think Patty would appreciate the honesty.”

“Alright fine, let’s go to North Korea,” Mac teased, slapping Jack’s shoulder with the back of his hand as he reached for his leather jacket. Jack rolled his eyes, jangling his keys. “After all, how bad could it be?”

— — — 

“How bad could it be?!” Jack roared as he yanked the steering wheel to the left, sending the makeshift armored car careening around the corner towards the border.

“So I slightly underestimated how fine it would be, sue me!” Mac grit his teeth as the car hit a bump that shook the fertilizer from his hands and into his lap. “It’s not like I anticipated being caught out by someone who actually speaks English!”

“People learn English, Mac, that’s a thing that happens!”

“But not usually in  _ North Korea _ !”

Jack hit another pothole that sent the car jumping through the air, Mac’s stomach swooped with the feeling of weightlessness before the inevitable crash had him jerking against his seatbelt. With a click, Jack suddenly turned the radio transmitter off, cutting them off from the Phoenix Headquarters where Riley was no doubt panicking thinking that the satellite signal had been lost. Mac’s heart stuttered.

“Face it man, you’ve been off your game ever since you came back from Italy!” Jack groused, ducking instinctually as the North Korean’s began firing through the back window. Most of the bullets were ricocheting off the makeshift armor that Mac had rigged but it never hurt to be careful.

“Okay, can we not start on this right now?” Mac shouted back, rolling his window down with a grumble. He unbuckled his seatbelt and leaned out of the window, winding back to give his makeshift bomb a heavy toss. He felt Jack gripping the back of his pants and belt and he felt a tiny grain of gratitude - he’d fallen out of a stagecoach once.

Keyword:  _ once _ .

The homemade explosive sent debris flying but he’d missed the following vehicle by about fifteen feet. The hummer swerved and Mac could hear the screech of the driver slamming the brakes but he was already being pulled inside by Jack.

“This is the perfect time to start on it, man! Because your being off your game is what got us into this mess! I know Nikki’s betrayal really messed you up, but suddenly you’re keeping secrets and actin’ all cagey about what happened back there and you expect me to think everything’s okay?” Jack’s voice was pained and he swore as he swerved avoiding a tree that had grown in the middle of the disused road. The road itself had most likely been abandoned after the Korean War.

(Mac wasn’t certain but he felt like he’d been on this road before, during his second tour of Korea. But a lot of the old roads looked the same, so maybe it was his mind playing tricks on him.)

“Everything’s fine, why can’t you just believe me?” Mac leaned back out of the window tossing his last bomb. This one hit its mark, sending one of the three pursuing hummers flipping into the air to on its hood.

“Because!” Jack huffed as Mac slid back into his seat. “You’re hiding something from me, man! I’ve known you long enough that I can tell when something’s off! What is it you can’t tell me? Is it a woman?”

For the third time that day Mac’s stomach hit the floor. But he saw the easy way out and he knew he was just cowardly enough to take it.

“Yes! Okay?” He snapped, the words tasting like ash in his mouth. “You happy now?”

Jack looked less than happy but he seemed relatively appeased. The border was growing closer and with every foot they careened down the unused road Mac’s unease grew.

“...Nikki?”

“What?!” Mac gaped openly at his partner. “No! What even - there was nothing going on between me and Nikki, Jack, what could have  _ possibly _ given you that idea?! _ ” _

“I dunno Mac, you tell me! You been hidin’ a woman, what, some girl you met in an Italian hospital? I don’t know how to trust you right now kid!”

“Yes! Fine! I met a woman!” Mac’s heart sunk and his throat felt like he was choking on something he’d swallowed.

“Good! Fine!” Jack reached out and clicked the radio back on and they both ignored the panicked questions from Thornton and Riley as they focused on their continued survival and escape.

“Fine!”

They crashed through the cement barricade and came to a screeching halt in front of a row of South Korean soldiers all pointing semi-automatics at the car. Mac’s Korean was rudimentary at best, rusty and unintelligible at worst. But he understood that shouting and guns meant get out of the car with your hands up.

Some things were universal across languages and time.

— — —

Mac and Jack trailed into the newly christened Phoenix Foundation headquarters exhausted, sweaty, and covered with a fine layer of North Korean dirt. They were making their way to the showers in terse silence when a voice rang out -- “Dalton! MacGyver! War Room, now!” 

Patricia Thornton was standing at the door to the War Room, arms crossed and her eyes narrowed as she watched the small procession of her agents as if she could pry their secrets from them with her eyes alone. “Time for a Mission Review,” she snapped. “Alone.” Her eyes flicked to Riley who was waiting at the edge of the door looking sheepish and uncertain.

With a heavy sigh between them, Mac and Jack filed into the War Room, the door closing behind them with an ominous click.

Patricia Thornton was an intimidating figure, and Mac had met plenty of them over his lifetime. There was the school teacher in Indiana - who once threw a slate at him (for reasons mostly unrelated to the fact that he had asked her to the New Years Dance). Then there was the Railroad Engineer who quite literally railroaded Mac out of town (another very long story that had to do with the Engineer’s younger brother who had started to take after Mac).

Suffice to say Mac had been intimidated several times by people much more terrifying than a slender woman in a pair of fantastic heels, but at that moment he very much wished he was anywhere else.

“So, would you like to explain to me how my two best undercover agents managed to infiltrate North Korea before spectacularly  _ blowing their cover _ ?”

Mac swallowed hard. He could practically feel Jack begin to sweat. Thornton’s eyes were cold and hard - well, colder and harder than normal. Mac felt a prickle of fear dance up his spine. He knew that she couldn’t hurt him in the long run (missing limbs? They grew back in the next regeneration. Scars? Never met them.) but he couldn’t help but feel a tremor of unease at her expression.

“Well, Patty,” Jack tried for charming but a wave of Thornton’s hand sent his words back into his mouth with a near audible click of his jaw.

“Don’t  _ Patty _ me Jack Dalton. Oversight is livid at this blatant misstep that could have been avoided had my agents been working together, instead of whatever the hell that was.” She glowered directly at Mac then, and Mac knew he was sunk.

Jack, however, seemed to bristle under Thornton’s attention being shifted onto Mac. (He always did seem to get more angry when it was Mac under fire rather than himself.) “Now hang on a minute, Patty, the way I see it unless Mr. Oversight wants to come and give me a performance review himself, he shouldn’t be sending you off to play hatchet man.”

Thornton offered an exaggerated eye roll and huffed. “You’re not  _ fired _ Dalton, but you’re certainly close. Oversight is concerned about how the two of you are working as a team given how he didn’t want to hire you on in the first place.”

Mac did a mental double take. “Sorry, what? What do you mean Oversight didn’t want to hire Jack?”

“I mean what I said - Oversight only wanted you, Mac, but you vouched so strongly for Jack during your interview that Oversight opted to allow Jack onto the team. So far he hasn’t had reason for concern - until now.”

Mac should have known he should never have gotten out of bed. The dream was the first indication that everything was going to go spectacularly wrong. And now he was facing possible repercussions that could take Jack away from him - all from his own mistake.

His  own mistake in choosing to come back after he died in Italy - instead of cutting his losses and moving on, starting a new life like he had so many times before .

Maybe even his own mistake in ever meeting Jack Dalton.

Mac mentally slapped himself.  _ No! _ Never a mistake. His heart wrung itself out as he thought of a world where he had never met Sergeant Jack Dalton and he pushed the thought roughly aside. The only problem in this equation was Mac and the secret he was hiding, not Jack.

Never Jack.

“Look, Director Thornton, today was entirely my fault,” he finally said, landing on the only excuse he could find. “Things have been weird since Italy but Jack and I have worked it out. I’m going to get back on my A-Game and then Oversight will have nothing to worry about.”

Thornton seemed relatively appeased and her expression relaxed fractionally, her eyes seemingly still calculating the odds of Mac’s survival from whatever wrath he could call down from the mysterious Oversight.

He and Jack were clearly dismissed by Thornton’s levelled gaze, and they both turned on their heels and walked out of the War Room, stumbling into Riley who was pacing nervously outside the door.

“Riley?” Mac stared at the nerve wracked framed of his newest teammate. “What’s going on?”

Riley bit her lip and wrung her hands. “So, I just wanted to make sure that everything was okay. I know I’m new on the team and it was my first mission after my trial run and you guys were in there for a long time, and I just--”

“Yeah Riley,” Mac’s voice sounded as exhausted as he felt, the fight having drained out in the car with Jack. “You did really good.”

It was hard to remember sometimes just how young Riley really was. They may have looked the same age, but Riley was only 24, fresh out of the system and still afraid for her future. Mac was 326, and the hope for his future had faded a long time ago.

Riley perked up and relaxed at his words, falling into a familiar banter with Jack that Mac didn’t really pay close attention to. He could read the affection she had for Jack buried under all the pain and anger she was taking out on him -- and whatever it was about, he knew it was probably Jack’s fault. As much as he loved Jack, he also knew that Jack was human and Jack made plenty of mistakes.

A heavy hand landed on Mac’s shoulder and he jumped, glancing up into the worried eyes of his partner. “You alright there hoss?”

“Yeah, just tired. I didn’t really sleep well.” (After his nightmare, he’d tried to sleep on the plane to Korea. He’d failed. He’d tried to sleep on the way home. He’d failed. It had been a long 36 hours.)

Jack only nodded, slinging an arm around Mac’s shoulders. But the feeling wasn’t the same as it had been before. Gone was the familiar warmth and comfort and in its place was a tenseness and distance that Mac could feel at his very core. Guilt gnawed away beneath his ribcage, the poison of his own lie eroding at his sense of self. Mac wasn’t much but he was honest, and to have to keep something so fundamental from someone he cared about - from someone he loved - it just didn’t sit well, and he knew that Jack could tell something was wrong. 

Jack guided Mac to the GTO in silence before herding Mac inside.

“I’ve got your back, man, you just gotta trust me,” Jack said softly, closing the car door.

Mac really did trust Jack, more than anyone.

Mac rode the entire way back to his house in silence, Jack occasionally flipping through the radio stations, the conversation between them in North Korea weighing heavily in the air despite Jack’s overt attempts at normalcy. Mac rolled the words over in his mind on repeat. He had lied, Jack knew he was lying, and there was a wedge sitting between them now, shoving them apart. And all because of a secret he couldn’t share.

Later, as Thorton called them into the office to give them their next mission, Mac felt the silence of his own shame again as Jack barely glanced at him. Mac slid into his customary seat in the War Room with heavy shoulders. He wondered if he could find a way to apologize to Jack without having to explain himself. He wanted to repair his relationship with his best friend and his partner, because nothing mattered more to him - it was the reason he’d come back from Italy in the first place when he could have easily just left them all behind.

But then Sarah’s picture appeared on the screen and Jack looked heartbroken, the pain in his eyes familiar to Mac in more ways than one.

And then they found Sarah, fighting through the depths of Venezuela, and Jack looked at her as if she could ask him for the moon and he’d throw a lasso around it.

Jack looked at Sarah the way that Mac caught himself looking at Jack.

And as he watched Jack comfort Sarah on the side of the road, cradling her head with his gun calloused hands, Mac wondered if perhaps things would have been easier after that bullet in Italy if he’d just stayed dead after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Who wants to take bets now on how many chapters are named after an Emily Dickinson poem
> 
> As always, come scream at me on [tumblr](https://lavendersblues.tumblr.com/) about MacDalton, I've got time

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired by a tumblr ask meme. Everyone reacted so strongly to my summary of events that I've decided to actually write it out. So here we go, a MacDalton Phoenix AU. Strap in, it's going to be a wild ride.


End file.
